Noob Blood DK Questions

Hello,

Im a little late to the expac but wanted to main a Blood DK. Just had some questions. Is it difficult to find Mythic groups with BDK ? As someone with slower than Call of Duty Reflexes is it hard to play with your health bar violently going up and down like that or is it pretty easy to get a handle on it ?

No, mythic groups are easy to find as any tank, as long as you have appropriate experience for the group you are applying for. It’s not like DPS where you need more experience than what the content calls for.

Does the health bar bounce? Depends how you play. If you pull more mobs than you can reasonably handle, sure. If you don’t use defensive cooldowns when you should, sure. If your ilvl is too low for the size of the pull, sure.

Do you need CoD reflexes, maybe on Raging week.

If you’ve never tanked before or aren’t sure about yourself in that role, I recommend starting with a warrior or to a lesser extent a druid. They each have a 1 button active mitigation rotation, flat but effective big DR cooldowns, and a much easier time with threat. Druid tanking is pretty boring but prot warrior manages to be fairly engaging.

Personally, the appearance of a healthbar going violently up and down is often a good sign, because it means the DK is on top of quicky responding to heavy hits.

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Thanks I may still give it a go. Is it possible to do some sort of stamina / damage mitigation build that’s viable like some other poster claimed he does with out linking his armory in another post or is it pretty much death strike or bust ?

Biggest thing to do as a new blood dk is to avoid overhealing with death strike, unless you’re over capped on runic power. Do this and you won’t be a nightmare to your healer. The rest will come with practice and experience.

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BDK is very strong defensively. Talents like Will of the Necropolis and Purgatory can give you a large backboard to help you get to grips with self sustain. I would also recommend Voracious as another talent when your lower geared. The extra healing from Death Strike is just another option to help you get comfortable.

The area you will likely struggle with for a time is generating Threat at the start of pulls. BDK has less then fantastic damage in Shadowlands compared to other tanks. Farther more if other group member roll in to a pull with hard hitting abilities or cooldowns you might struggle to round everything up. This will get a lot easier with gear but using tools like Dancing Rune Weapon and your covenant ability to start pulls.
I would also recommend using addons like Mythic Dungeon tools to plan out your route so you know what you want to pull and when before going in to a dungeon. This will help you keep up the pace and let you go from pull to pull with more confidence.

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yes for sure cuz forums are full of pants sniffers who will try to exploit any found weakness to discredit originality.

Get into it, play Blood. But all the theory you can find dont compare to what you have to do before getting to actually test your dk among all puggers.
Develop your character first doing all the covenant stuff for renowns and Korthia bs dailies and weekly to update your conduits to 226.

Often return to your spellbook and soulbind trees+talents and read again all the tooltips, including your unused conduits, as you progress and get your actionbars or keybindings sorted out. Just to stay on your toes with your spec.

Solo Torghast as Blood and put yourself in trouble. Get Cinders enough for a minimum of two legendaries for 9.2 (at the least 2 cuz you may want to try other legendaries than the ‘‘parry’’ one, which is not bad. Also, torghast, use your control undead ability and look for the big trouble-maker, that can help.

Get your daily earning of conquest in BG to buy Vers gear + crit.

Torghast-solo and BGs will sharpen your survival skills. That is more important than talents and conduits as you should research different builds with everything there is at your disposal.

Know what to use for Single target vs Cleave vs Multi as for dmg

You can separate all that is at your service as for abilities. But here’s a quick breakdown

There is a 2min CD for Parry with a Legendary associated to it
There is Bone Shield that gives Armor
Bone shield (mitigation) uses same resource needed to heal yourself with Death Strike. So you have to decide. Using runes for armor, or using runes to build runic powers for healing. One is a simple use of your rune, the other is a two-step action.

Death Strike also applies Blood Shield (absorb) and you’ll constantly have to work for that resource if you commit to that build. Hence why that post you read talks about the tier-set, saying i may be forced to follow the line and change my whole build.

So you see… you always walk that line, what to do with your Runic Powers. Mitigation …or… Heal+absorb (your mastery)

You didnt ask for the rotation but i didnt include half of it anyhoo. I only wanted to put some light on this spec, and encourage you to play it.
If you know the core system, all the rest is bonus for you to squeeze in and enjoy.

A DS build (in the hand of an experienced machine) is excellent but you are bound to it and noobs die if they dont take Necropolis, when they keep chain pulling until they aggro the mother bird in DoS for instance, or when healer have no more juice to help.

Since you mentioned me in your post, I’ll tell you I like to count on Ossuary and Blood Tap to have all the Runic Powers i can to use Bonestorm. With all the other goodies and lots of Stamina with its Condensed Anima Sphere conduit (4.5% @ 226), i’m good without ever worrying about the Death Strike storyline.

I heal less, i do more dmg. Healer heals more, do less dmg.
But some healers dont do any dmg so, idc they’re happy throwing me a real heal once in a while.

Now that i practiced something else, i better understand the whole picture than if i only read and applied what 1 individual wrote for millions (main sites promotes the same build, no variances? The agenda of them influencers are mind buggling me. But they sure created enough content around DS blizz maybe had no choice to make a tier-set about it so no one starts throwing rocks at them. But still, here’s a lousy monotone boring boo for ya blizz. boooooooo for making only on tier-set.

If you go on Raider. io webpage, there is a tab called Learn. You can read the section ‘‘Know your tank’’ to learn good stuff. DeathStrike is there called the CORE ability. But it dont have to be.

For sure play DK. Play healer too, to compare yourself

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If you dare jumping in the game as a tank when everyone seen it all already and have expectations, man i’m sure you can do it and will have skills ready for 9.2

You could play Paladin or Monk so you can learn the dungeons faster, and have more opportunities in the LFG tab. Tank, heal, dps. Faster queue, faster gearing, faster learning. Click all three.

If i may say, there is lots of storyline to go thru to unlock skips for alts so make sure you dedicate a toon to that. Unlock Torghast, unlock Korthia, and avoid all the normal quests, only do the epic ones or ones progressing thru the chapters, usually from the council in oribos and from your covenant, once established.

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A good UI helps a lot. You should be able to see your health and runic power close to where your character is. That way when you see your hp get chunked you know to death strike.

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Better yet use the blood shield tracker add on, or there may be a weak aura out there now that accomplishes the same thing.

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You’ll be fine. Blood DK is great. I recommend maining it, personally. You have a ton of control - more control over your run than most other tanks imo. Makes it a blast.

Just an update things became way easier once I hit Shadowlands and got proper stats. I dont know if its because the heirloom gear has just haste and crit mostly and no versatility or mastery or what but in some tbc leveling dungeons I could be taken to half heath in one swing. 50 to 60 however was almost impossible to die feels great. Dmg is a another story though. As a fresh 60 now with no legendary the ramp up to get the bone shield stacks is also annoying if there is any drop off in my pace but its quite fun outside of those issues.

Seems like super weird scaling while leveling with this class. Hope it doesn’t dissuade other new potential Blood Dks as things change drastically it seems compared to other tanks once getting proper stat gear / getting to Shadowlands.

Blood really needs it’s full toolkit to work which is why it feels bad to level with. The destination is much better than the journey.

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Not sure what you mean by “a Death Strike build”?

Death Strike is central to Blood DK, regardless of build; it’s not something you build around.

Also what talent do you prefer over Necropolis and why do you refer to Necropolis as a “noob trap”? Necropolis is the best talent on that row, by far.

The alternative, Mark of Blood is just bad and only marginally useful on fast attacking targets, which is super rare while also requiring a lot of extra GCDs just to try and maintain its pitiful healing. And while Anti Magic Barrier is a great talent it’s only situationally chosen(and very rarely at that).

Necropolis is chosen as the default because it is just that good with how Blood DKs mitigation works(being able to buffer your health before a huge Death Strike) and recommending new players not to use it is doing a disservice to them.

Again, Death Strike and Blood Shield is central to Blood DK. You keep mentioning a different “build” are you sure you’re not thinking of a different class? Because out side of a few interchangable talents/Conduits Blood DK plays pretty much the same for everybody. DS and Blood Shield are both gunna be utilized no matter what choices you make.

Condensed Anima Sphere is garbage for the same reasons as Mark or Blood but worse because it has an internal cooldown.

Not to mention you can’t control when the healing from it procs.

Even if you have 100k health the healing you get back from it won’t even beat your base combat Regen. It’s laughably bad and should never be chosen.

Lol. No you’re not. If your not using Death Strike something is bad wrong or you’re playing trivial content to where it doesn’t matter.

Even if you only use it to prevent over capping on resources it still your hardest hitting attack.

It’s fine to experiment or play how you want but it’s dishonest to come into a help thread representing the nonsense your talking as fact.

BDKs tend to be monstrous self healers. They can sustain without outside healing with the right talents and rotation. Which means it’s easy to find a group around your current rating. You absolutely get used to your health oscillating frequently, to the point where it feels odd if it doesn’t.

You seem to know DK a lot. Is it possible to make a Blood DK for DPS and not tank? I cant find this anywhere.

I would think it would be getting things like Hemostasis, Voracious, Insatiable Appetite, Death’s Certainty and anything else has to do with Death Strike.

But yes, death strike is the bread and butter of Blood. And 9.2 isnt looking too good for Blood in terms of the tier set and the bugs that it has. They need to be fixed.

But its looking like you might want to just go crazy with Parry increase (possibly) if the set works properly. Might be completely wrong but only casted heart strikes are increasing the duration of Dancing Rune Weapon, only the parry portion of the ability is being extended, its extending the duration of Dancing Rune Weapon by 1.5 seconds (could be because of the extra weapons doing heart strikes as well and its counting as 3 heart strikes so .5 x 3 = 1.5 and could be a possibility).

You can see the listed bugs on the PTR forums which I tested out and confirmed. But I dont think the tier set and Crimson Rune Weapon is going to be a good combo since high uptime on avoidance will reduce the effectiveness of the Legendary and Gorefiend’s Domination might possibly turn out to be good unless the generated heart strikes dont actually dont work with that Legendary.

Im think im going to test that. I didnt like Crimson Rune Weapon with the tier set though, it felt awful.